THE SOUTH: Stalemate on Segregation

From a tense week of legal march and countermarch, political charge and countercharge, the U.S. emerged one big step behind its starting point. Plain for the world to see and ponder was the sorry possibility that Little Rock’s Central High School, integrated last year in a costly, painful victory for law and morality, might reopen next week lily-white.

“The Time Has Not Come.” The week’s legal maneuvering began in St. Louis, where the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by a 6-to-1 vote ringingly struck down Arkansas District Judge Harry J. Lemley’s decision postponing integration in Little Rock until early 1961 (TIME, June 30). Arkansan Lemley had based his cooling-off decision on the truism that “popular opposition to integration” had led to “serious violence” in Little Rock.

But the essential issue, said the appellate court’s majority opinion, written by Judge Marion C. Matthes, was “whether overt public resistance, including mob protest, constitutes sufficient cause to nullify an order of the federal court.” To that question the Circuit Court gave a stern answer: “The time has not yet come in these United States when an order of a federal court must be whittled away, watered down or shamefully withdrawn in the face of violent and unlawful acts of individual citizens.”

Yet just three days after rendering its decision, the St. Louis court brought a temporary legal stalemate by granting to Little Rock’s harried school board a 30-day stay in executing the court’s integration order so that it could be appealed to the Supreme Court of the U.S. In a hurried move to settle the matter before Arkansas’ schools open, the Supreme Court scheduled one of its rare special sessions for Thursday of this week.

“Most Serious Problem.” The political battle was stalemated, too. At his press conference last week, President Eisenhower made it clear that, if necessary, he would again send troops to Little Rock to squelch violent defiance of federal court orders. Each state, he said, is duty bound to keep mob violence from frustrating “the preservation of individual rights as determined by a court decree . . . My feelings are exactly as they were a year ago.” At the same time, the President again declined to bring the moral influence of his office to bear on the integration issue. In a remarkable self-evaluation of his influence, he said that he would not want to “weaken public opinion” by expressing his personal views on desegregation.

Arkansas’ Governor Orval Faubus, just nominated (and thus elected) for his third term, had no such qualms. “Compliance,” sneered Faubus, “cannot be obtained by invoking the sacred name of the Constitution, or by the use of the once-magic name of Eisenhower.” At week’s end he called a special session of the Arkansas legislature, asked it to pass a new set of anti-integration laws—in Southern anticipation of a final Supreme Court order to reintegrate Central High.